Octal number problem
sik0fewl
xxdigitalhellxx at hotmail.com
Thu Feb 20 10:07:04 EST 2003
Gary Duncan wrote:
>
> Python has the quaint behaviour of interpreting
> a numeric string with a leading zero as octal, a bit like C.
>
> How does one disable this behaviour, ie get it to
> treat such strings as a "normal" decimal number ?
>
> I've had a quick search via Google for an answer and nothing
> lept out at me. Lutz and Aschers "Learning Python" book had the
> 'wink-wink/nudge-nudge' comment "Python interprets them [numbers with
> leading 0s] as octal constants, which usually don't work as you'd expect!'
>
> (Was that from "Life of Brian" ? the exclamation mark was theirs, btw ;)
>
> (In an item a few days ago, I complained of the unhelpful
> diagnostic one gets from Python when one inputs say "0999";
> ie "Syntax Error: invalid token". But thats a side issue)
>
>
> A bit of background:-
>
> I have a list of 5-digit decimal numbers, which was constructed
> with leading zeroes where necessary so that the list is sorted by magnitude
> using Unix 'sort' (otherwise '00200' would appear before '1').
Well, if you have it as a string in the form "00200" then int("00200")
would work fine.. if not then I'm not sure. I'm sure there's a way you
could convert it back to decimal, but as you said "0999" == bad.
--
Ryan
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